Nexsan NST Storage System Aimed at Small Businesses

By Nathan Eddy |
Posted 2012-03-06

Storage specialist Nexsan
launched a line of solid-state enhanced unified storage systems, known as the
NST series. In addition to providing both file-mode (network-attached storage,
or NAS) and block-mode (iSCSI), the NST series combines solidstate storage
with Serial ATA (SATA) and SAS drives via Nexsan's
FasTier acceleration technology. FasTier automatically and intelligently uses
the speed of solid-state memory in a fault-tolerant architecture to accelerate
the performance of SAS and SATA spinning media. Prices start at $16,000 and
scale based on configuration.

NST unified storage systems
with FasTier are designed to optimize caching and tiering by using dynamic RAM
and flash-based solid-state memory, along with spinning media, to triple
real-world random I/O performance. The new NST systems combine FasTiers
software with up to 24 Xeon CPU cores, 192GB of DRAM, 12 dedicated RAID engines
and up to1PB of storage capacity.

The technology can scale
from 100GB to 2.8TB, allowing an NST system to hold entire working sets,
without the need to use a separate management paradigm. The systems also
deliver a storage density of nearly 15 drives per U of rack space, and AutoMaid
power management for up to 85 percent lower power and cooling costs.

According to a recent report
from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), the adoption rate of unified storage
is growing steadily. Unified storage is attractive in terms of both operational
and financial efficienciesa winning combination by any standard, said Mark
Peters, senior analyst at ESG. The combination of unremitting data growth, a
still-cautious macroeconomic climate and massively higher expectations of IT,
means users are not only seeking better cost structures in their infrastructure
but simultaneously want better performance and application support."

Peters said Nexsan can provide
that mix with its FASTier-enabled NST5000, by delivering significant advances
in unified storage that can help IT organizations economically increase their
productivity in both highly virtualized and/or cloud computing environments.

For our cloud initiative,
we required a reliable, high-performance storage solution that also provided
the densest storage possible, said Sanford Coker, director of storage
administration for managed hosting services provider Datapipe. The NST with
FasTier accelerated storage option provided the performance we needed in the
package required. The result is enhanced productivity and operational
efficiencies giving us better business performance at a lower cost.

NST storage systems feature
a graphical user interface with wizards designed to streamline setup and
maintenance for the IT generalist. Nexsan Flexible Scalability helps break
through the barriers imposed by scale-up architectures whose controllers cannot
keep up as the population of drives is increased, and is offered on all NST
storage systems. The systems include multiple models that range from 8TBs to
more than 1PB.

At Nexsan, our goal is to
deliver the best-in-class, turnkey solutions that match the needs of todays
demanding midsize enterprises, said Gary Watson, CTO of Nexsan. With the NST
systems, we have paired support for iSCSI block, NFS/CIFS shared folders,
snapshots, replication, quotas, thin provisioning and online capacity expansion
all into one easy-to-manage solution. The result is an enterprise-class storage
system that can meet the capacity, performance and availability needs of any
environment, without a heavy investment.